Attention-grabbing exploits are becoming the norm. We hear about bugs like Heartbleed and IE 0days almost every week. Understandably the public is concerned about insecure technology. Yet for those of us who work in information security, this isn’t news at all. We have long known that insecure software is the root cause of most breaches.

Despite SAMM’s comprehensive guidelines around establishing an organization-wide security program and integrating security into in-house software development life-cycle, it does not elaborate as much on third-party vendor security and outsourced software development.

While OWASP has been around for a long time, and many security experts are aware of their top 10 web vulnerability report, I thought it would be beneficial to elaborate and share a bit more color on each one. This blog series will focus on some of the most common web attack vectors, how they are exploited, some examples, and finally how to prevent the exploit on your own applications.

While there are many granular reasons for software security failures at the institutional, developer or vendor level - there are five industry-wide problems that are fueling the current state of insecurity. These are complicated problems and will not be easy to solve. But until we do, software security will remain at risk.

On February 15, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) came out with its 2013 list of candidates for the Top 10 web application security flaws. The challenge is that while the Top 10 details security flaws, these flaws don’t map cleanly to requirements.

We can't expect the OWASP community to continue forward as a collection of application-security focused professionals without developer outreach, education, and more outreach. Application (and software) security isn't about security people at all, it's about developers...

The time it takes to crack a password is the only true measure of its worth. Morris has created a tool for administrators that allows them to configure a password policy based on the time to crack, the possible technology that an attacker might be using, and the password protection technology in use...

From experience, there are 3 clearly identified causes for poor adoption of well-intentioned security-built technology into everyday development and systems building... Let's take a look at them and see what can be done to raise the level of adoption from each case...

Blaming OWASP and developers for not adopting secure coding is silly. Uuntil the business cares about security, and developers have an incentive to write more secure code, tools and simple to use transparent technologies like that which OWASP provides won't get utilized...

Mobile Application testing is something that will evolve as mobile apps get more complex and the business drives more towards mobile solutions. If you’re deploying mobile apps for your business it’s more important than ever to have testing done on three areas at a minimum....

Operating as a community of like-minded professionals, OWASP issues software tools and knowledge-based documentation on application security. All of its articles, methodologies and technologies are made available free of charge to the public...

As we discussed at OWASP AppSec APAC in Sydney recently, there is still too much focus being given to the security of infrastructure, and we're spending a disproportionate amount of time on the security of networks, servers, etc. rather than actually looking at the applications...

Given a finite amount of time to write a piece of software with specified features and functionality the security of that code will always take a back seat. At least for the time being.Let's face it, code breaks in strange ways that it's not always easy to understand...

What's interesting is the question of business value. Management sends employees to 'security conferences' to learn something and bring it back to the organization. But what value do the ever-increasing number of security conferences provide as stand-alone events?

"The Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is an easy to use integrated penetration testing tool for finding vulnerabilities in web applications... ZAP provides automated scanners as well as a set of tools that allow you to find security vulnerabilities manually..."